The T-1 situation is solved [1]—seems that for the past 5 millions years (according to Smirk, who has done something like 47 million of these things) The Monopolistic Phone Company has always provided the timing signal, so of course our DSU (Data/Digital Service Unit) were set to use the timing signal provided by The Monopolistic Phone Company, but for some reason, in the recent past (read: a few weeks ago, possibly to spite us) no longer provide a timing signal for a point-to-point T-1.
The upshot: we now have to provide the timing signal. No big deal, once we figured out that The Monopolistic Phone Company no longer does that.
The company with the T-1 also has a wireless shot with us, and today they wrote in saying it was slow—only 1.1Mpbs (Megabits per second) to some random speed-testing site [2] deep out into the Internet. I did a test more locally, from their side of the network to our side, using iperf [3] and got a consistent 3.4Mbps (Megabits per second)—pretty much the maximum through the wireless connection.
Another customer with a wireless called in and he too, reported sub-optimal speeds, again, deep into the Internet. He wasn't in a position to run iperf but a few test pings throughout our network showed no problems. Once he started pinging outside our network to targets deep into the Internet, the speed drop was dramatic. I'm beginning to wonder if some of our routing peers are … problematic. [4]
I'm still trying to resolve the email situation [5]—we're now waiting for a response back from abuse@mpc.example.net and postmaster@mpc.example.net. Last time I checked, Lower Sheol was still hot.
[2] http://www.dslreports.com/stest